Regardless of whether or not a way is found out of the logjam in Parliament, disruption will remain its defining feature during the remaining four years of the Modi government. This is because Indian politics has become increasingly combative and retributive, manifest in the tit-for-tat tactics the political class has employed over the years.
Is it possible for the Modi government to ensure Parliament works smoothly, without its proceedings being repeatedly aborted? What solutions can it offer to reduce the possibility of Parliament witnessing periodic deadlocks?
Blowback time
In many ways, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing a blowback from the politics of confrontation that the Bharatiya Janata Party pursued during the years of the United Progressive Alliance rule. Thus, as the data of the PRS Legislative Research shows, the Lok Sabha in the winter session of 2010 worked for barely 5.5 per cent of the scheduled time and the Rajya Sabha just 2.1 per cent. Three years later, the situation didn’t really improve in the concluding session of the last Lok Sabha – it lost 79 per cent of its scheduled time to heckling and hollering.
The retributive nature of our politics provides the Congress ample political – but not moral – justification for emulating the BJP’s tactics of paralysing Parliament. Even before the BJP discovered the power of its collective larynx, India’s parliamentary performance had been steadily dipping – the last Lok Sabha sat for around 350 days over five years, as against the average 600 days clocked by each of the first three Lok Sabhas, between 1952 and 1967.
Breaking the deadlock
To check this deterioration, or to reverse it, the vicious circle of logjam created through the tit-for-tat tactics has to be broken. Given his slogan of India-first, over caste/community interests and partisan politics, should not Modi demonstrate that he practices what he preaches?
For starters, therefore, the Prime Minister should apologise for his party’s misconduct in the Lok Sabha. That despite the legitimacy of its demands for a Joint Parliamentary Probe into the infamous 2G scam or for the resignation of ministers accused of corruption, the tactics of disrupting Parliament was unbecoming of BJP MPs. This isn’t to say the Congress has always behaved decorously – its members, too, stalled Parliament over the coffin scam and video footage of then BJP president Bangaru Laxman accepting money from journalists in a sting operation.
Yet it is in Modi’s interest to apologise, however much it goes against his grain, because the deadlock in Parliament is inimical to his government’s interests. The BJP won’t be able to muster a majority in the Rajya Sabha over the next four years; he simply can’t push every bill through a joint session of the two Houses, should the Congress remain alienated from and adamantly opposed to him.
Once Modi has tendered an apology for the BJP’s past conduct, he should invite all parties for a dialogue to strengthen the institution of Parliament. There are two aspects to it – one entails putting together a mechanism to address the causes underlying the disruption of Parliament. The second is extremely problematic, as it pertains to morality, namely, determining whether charges of impropriety levelled against a minister are grave enough for him or her to resign.
The need to mull an institutional mechanism arises from a dichotomy – Parliament is supposed to keep a watch on the government, point to its acts of omission and commission, yet it is, in reality, controlled by the ruling party. It is the governing party which determines when Parliament should meet and what its agenda will be. Obviously, the government wants Parliament to listen to its tune – and to drown it out the Opposition creates a din.
In India, Parliament is convened by the President on the advice of the government, subject to the condition that it should meet once every six months. Experts on legislatures suggest a provision should be introduced in the Constitution that makes it mandatory for the convening of Parliament should a certain number of MPs demand it.
Such a provision would ensure contentious issues, even those festering for weeks, are not necessarily raised during the traditional three sessions – budget, monsoon and winter – which Indian Parliament has. Even Pakistan’s Constitution has a provision which makes it incumbent upon the Speaker to convene the National Assembly, its popular House, within 14 days of one-fourth of its members requisitioning it.
Just how this provision could have helped pre-empt the current deadlock needs to be illustrated. For instance, Opposition MPs could have asked for the convening of Parliament at the time the story about Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s impropriety in helping Lalit Modi procure travel documents hit the headlines. Whether or not she should resign could have been discussed and thrashed out before the monsoon session of Parliament, or resolved through negotiations between the government and the Opposition, as is now likely to happen in the foreseeable future.
The second possible solution is to have Parliament meet round-the-year, Monday to Friday, instead of the three sessions for which it meets, as is the current practice. Episodic meetings are bound to create episodes, so to speak. Parliamentarians want to appropriate time to raise issues they think are important. These are not necessarily the priorities of the government, which might be keener on creating a legislative framework for executing its policies in the limited time it has than, say, discussing a railway accident. It is this divergence of views which lead to deadlocks.
Britain, whose democratic traditions India follows to a great extent, has five 12-month sessions over every Parliament, which, from 2010, begins and ends in the spring. The Speaker lays out the entire annual calendar as soon as a new government is formed, marking the periods of recesses, the hours of meetings on every day of the week, and on which day the Opposition gets the preference to raise issues.
Agenda for Parliament
India has had several all-India Whips Conferences. These have tried to identify the causes behind the disruption of legislatures. A common complaint has been that the Opposition rarely ever gets adequate time to raise issues it considers important. They also think delay in taking prompt action against MPs for disrupting the House has aggravated the problem. In the current Lok Sabha, nobody can fault Speaker Sumitra Mahajan on this count, though punitive measures, as the Congress has demonstrated, don’t always have a restraining influence.
This is precisely why some, including one of the Whips Conferences, offer Solution No. 3 – reserve a day in the week for the Opposition to set the agenda for Parliament.
This is indeed the custom in the UK Parliament – 20 days of every session have the Opposition spell out the parliamentary agenda. Out of these 20 days, 17 are assigned to the principal Opposition party and the remaining three to the others. In Canada, the Opposition sets the parliamentary ball rolling on 22 days every calendar year.
The advantages of this mechanism are palpable – the government can’t shy away from discussing issues inconvenient to it; the Opposition won’t be smarting as it would get ample opportunities to vent its anger or put the government in the dock. At least, on all other days, the legislative work of Parliament won’t suffer, and bills won’t be passed in a hurry without adequate discussion, increasingly the feature of our Parliament.
But no mechanism can ever reverse the declining performance of Parliament as long as there is no consensus when a minister ought to resign, should she or he face charges of impropriety, financial or otherwise. Deadlocks are inevitable as long as MPs insist a minister must resign before they would allow Parliament to work – and the government, as obstinately, refuses to acquiesce. This was the single most important factor why the last Lok Sabha stalled regularly, which increasingly seems will become the fate of the present one as well.
Ultimately, resignation is a function of ideas of morality, and also whether the ruling party fears alienating the public by refusing to let go of a minister who is popularly perceived to have violated the law or norms of propriety.
In Britain, for instance, 18 ministers, including those who were junior or in the Cabinet, resigned from the last government of David Cameron, before he led his party to victory in this year’s election. A good many of them quit because of their financial and sexual improprieties, apart from personal reasons and policy differences with the Prime Minister. By comparison, 40 British ministers had resigned between 1970 and 1997. These resignations weren’t secured through prolonged boycott of British Parliament, which only sees suspension of work, at worst, for a few hours.
So what then explains their ouster from the government, voluntarily or otherwise? Perhaps the acute awareness among the political parties that perceived violation of the morality code could lead to their own destruction. There is a societal consensus on what constitutes the morality code.
In India, though, the morality code is often linked to caste-religion-linguistic-regional identities. Often, grassroots support renders irrelevant, say, the charge of corruption against a politician. The court of people triumphs over the verdict of the court. Count the number of ministers who win after having been accused of corruption. It is also true that ruling parties institute trumped up cases against their rivals.
Ultimately, the more equal a society the greater the chances of its Parliament functioning smoothly and efficiently. It is also about political outfits rising over their interests to maintain an ethical standard. Such idealism withered away decades ago, and a more equal society than we have today will take years to achieve. Till then, strengthening the institutional mechanism of Parliament will do.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, published by HarperCollins, is available in bookstores.
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Is it possible for the Modi government to ensure Parliament works smoothly, without its proceedings being repeatedly aborted? What solutions can it offer to reduce the possibility of Parliament witnessing periodic deadlocks?
Blowback time
In many ways, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is facing a blowback from the politics of confrontation that the Bharatiya Janata Party pursued during the years of the United Progressive Alliance rule. Thus, as the data of the PRS Legislative Research shows, the Lok Sabha in the winter session of 2010 worked for barely 5.5 per cent of the scheduled time and the Rajya Sabha just 2.1 per cent. Three years later, the situation didn’t really improve in the concluding session of the last Lok Sabha – it lost 79 per cent of its scheduled time to heckling and hollering.
The retributive nature of our politics provides the Congress ample political – but not moral – justification for emulating the BJP’s tactics of paralysing Parliament. Even before the BJP discovered the power of its collective larynx, India’s parliamentary performance had been steadily dipping – the last Lok Sabha sat for around 350 days over five years, as against the average 600 days clocked by each of the first three Lok Sabhas, between 1952 and 1967.
Breaking the deadlock
To check this deterioration, or to reverse it, the vicious circle of logjam created through the tit-for-tat tactics has to be broken. Given his slogan of India-first, over caste/community interests and partisan politics, should not Modi demonstrate that he practices what he preaches?
For starters, therefore, the Prime Minister should apologise for his party’s misconduct in the Lok Sabha. That despite the legitimacy of its demands for a Joint Parliamentary Probe into the infamous 2G scam or for the resignation of ministers accused of corruption, the tactics of disrupting Parliament was unbecoming of BJP MPs. This isn’t to say the Congress has always behaved decorously – its members, too, stalled Parliament over the coffin scam and video footage of then BJP president Bangaru Laxman accepting money from journalists in a sting operation.
Yet it is in Modi’s interest to apologise, however much it goes against his grain, because the deadlock in Parliament is inimical to his government’s interests. The BJP won’t be able to muster a majority in the Rajya Sabha over the next four years; he simply can’t push every bill through a joint session of the two Houses, should the Congress remain alienated from and adamantly opposed to him.
Once Modi has tendered an apology for the BJP’s past conduct, he should invite all parties for a dialogue to strengthen the institution of Parliament. There are two aspects to it – one entails putting together a mechanism to address the causes underlying the disruption of Parliament. The second is extremely problematic, as it pertains to morality, namely, determining whether charges of impropriety levelled against a minister are grave enough for him or her to resign.
The need to mull an institutional mechanism arises from a dichotomy – Parliament is supposed to keep a watch on the government, point to its acts of omission and commission, yet it is, in reality, controlled by the ruling party. It is the governing party which determines when Parliament should meet and what its agenda will be. Obviously, the government wants Parliament to listen to its tune – and to drown it out the Opposition creates a din.
In India, Parliament is convened by the President on the advice of the government, subject to the condition that it should meet once every six months. Experts on legislatures suggest a provision should be introduced in the Constitution that makes it mandatory for the convening of Parliament should a certain number of MPs demand it.
Such a provision would ensure contentious issues, even those festering for weeks, are not necessarily raised during the traditional three sessions – budget, monsoon and winter – which Indian Parliament has. Even Pakistan’s Constitution has a provision which makes it incumbent upon the Speaker to convene the National Assembly, its popular House, within 14 days of one-fourth of its members requisitioning it.
Just how this provision could have helped pre-empt the current deadlock needs to be illustrated. For instance, Opposition MPs could have asked for the convening of Parliament at the time the story about Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s impropriety in helping Lalit Modi procure travel documents hit the headlines. Whether or not she should resign could have been discussed and thrashed out before the monsoon session of Parliament, or resolved through negotiations between the government and the Opposition, as is now likely to happen in the foreseeable future.
The second possible solution is to have Parliament meet round-the-year, Monday to Friday, instead of the three sessions for which it meets, as is the current practice. Episodic meetings are bound to create episodes, so to speak. Parliamentarians want to appropriate time to raise issues they think are important. These are not necessarily the priorities of the government, which might be keener on creating a legislative framework for executing its policies in the limited time it has than, say, discussing a railway accident. It is this divergence of views which lead to deadlocks.
Britain, whose democratic traditions India follows to a great extent, has five 12-month sessions over every Parliament, which, from 2010, begins and ends in the spring. The Speaker lays out the entire annual calendar as soon as a new government is formed, marking the periods of recesses, the hours of meetings on every day of the week, and on which day the Opposition gets the preference to raise issues.
Agenda for Parliament
India has had several all-India Whips Conferences. These have tried to identify the causes behind the disruption of legislatures. A common complaint has been that the Opposition rarely ever gets adequate time to raise issues it considers important. They also think delay in taking prompt action against MPs for disrupting the House has aggravated the problem. In the current Lok Sabha, nobody can fault Speaker Sumitra Mahajan on this count, though punitive measures, as the Congress has demonstrated, don’t always have a restraining influence.
This is precisely why some, including one of the Whips Conferences, offer Solution No. 3 – reserve a day in the week for the Opposition to set the agenda for Parliament.
This is indeed the custom in the UK Parliament – 20 days of every session have the Opposition spell out the parliamentary agenda. Out of these 20 days, 17 are assigned to the principal Opposition party and the remaining three to the others. In Canada, the Opposition sets the parliamentary ball rolling on 22 days every calendar year.
The advantages of this mechanism are palpable – the government can’t shy away from discussing issues inconvenient to it; the Opposition won’t be smarting as it would get ample opportunities to vent its anger or put the government in the dock. At least, on all other days, the legislative work of Parliament won’t suffer, and bills won’t be passed in a hurry without adequate discussion, increasingly the feature of our Parliament.
But no mechanism can ever reverse the declining performance of Parliament as long as there is no consensus when a minister ought to resign, should she or he face charges of impropriety, financial or otherwise. Deadlocks are inevitable as long as MPs insist a minister must resign before they would allow Parliament to work – and the government, as obstinately, refuses to acquiesce. This was the single most important factor why the last Lok Sabha stalled regularly, which increasingly seems will become the fate of the present one as well.
Ultimately, resignation is a function of ideas of morality, and also whether the ruling party fears alienating the public by refusing to let go of a minister who is popularly perceived to have violated the law or norms of propriety.
In Britain, for instance, 18 ministers, including those who were junior or in the Cabinet, resigned from the last government of David Cameron, before he led his party to victory in this year’s election. A good many of them quit because of their financial and sexual improprieties, apart from personal reasons and policy differences with the Prime Minister. By comparison, 40 British ministers had resigned between 1970 and 1997. These resignations weren’t secured through prolonged boycott of British Parliament, which only sees suspension of work, at worst, for a few hours.
So what then explains their ouster from the government, voluntarily or otherwise? Perhaps the acute awareness among the political parties that perceived violation of the morality code could lead to their own destruction. There is a societal consensus on what constitutes the morality code.
In India, though, the morality code is often linked to caste-religion-linguistic-regional identities. Often, grassroots support renders irrelevant, say, the charge of corruption against a politician. The court of people triumphs over the verdict of the court. Count the number of ministers who win after having been accused of corruption. It is also true that ruling parties institute trumped up cases against their rivals.
Ultimately, the more equal a society the greater the chances of its Parliament functioning smoothly and efficiently. It is also about political outfits rising over their interests to maintain an ethical standard. Such idealism withered away decades ago, and a more equal society than we have today will take years to achieve. Till then, strengthening the institutional mechanism of Parliament will do.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, published by HarperCollins, is available in bookstores.